Using Social Media to Boost Your SEO

SEO and social media marketing are two sides of the same coin! Both are typically organic inbound traffic generation concepts which focus on building an identity and brand which can attract people naturally. But that’s about where the similarities end! Social media marketing relies much more on a strong brand image, on high-quality content. But social media and SEO can each be used to boost the other!

But the details are a little murky at best, and at worst, are just confusing. Many professional social media marketers don’t bother to state how social media marketing can directly aid your SEO; they just state the fact and assume the relationship between the two is a given. But we’ll go more deep than that, and demonstrate the best and most industry-proven ways to boost SEO with social media marketing.

Growing Your Followers Boosts Your Exposure

One of the biggest way to boost your SEO is to boost the number of followers on your social media pages and profiles. For example, a large enterprise with hundreds of thousands or millions of Facebook followers will have significantly more of a ranking bonus due to that social media platform than, say, a business with just 100 followers. But there are some catches: you’ll only receive benefit is all of those accounts are from legitimate people who are also active on their accounts. So just paying for followers or likes won’t really accomplish much for you! If you use social media analytics tools, you can easily track follower growth.

External Link-building

Social media helps to encourage other websites which stumble across your posts to link to your website. And as anyone involved in SEO knows, the more inbound links, the better! Of course, this means that you’ll need to provide the best bait for these links: high-quality content. And getting great content isn’t as easy as you’d think! You have to know your audience intimately, and need to provide the sort of content that your ideal audience will want to promote all on their own.

Optimizing Posts

Having posts optimized for distribution on social media means that it’s easier for Google to crawl and search for them. And popular social media posts are often likely to be indexed faster than many other items, meaning that a well-timed post on a popular social media page can help build more pages to your website in the top of SERPS. Optimizing will generally mean creating strong, keyword-driven titles, using keyword-optimized images and video, and having a well-written article that’s meaty and detailed. A great post intended to be shared on social media should be 300 words long at the bare minimum; but 1200 words or longer is ideal.

Strong Local Signals

Especially if you’re wanting to promote a local business, social media marketing can also send a lot of locally-oriented signals to Google and other search engines. Getting involved in location-oriented groups, with local brands, and even local influencers is a straightforward way to gain a lot of strong local signals. And these can arguably be even more important than broader social signals!

In Summary

These things can all help you gain some great positive SEO signals, and in general, it’s usually a good idea to incorporate social media management strategies into any SEO plan. Above all, though, both SEO and social media marketing rely on providing a great experience to potential users. The better your brand experience, the more likely that it’ll be shared and enjoyed by an increasingly large crowd. And of course, social media marketing can help any business reach an array of potential new visitors or customers which might have been difficult to net using SEO alone.

SEO and social media marketing are two sides of the same coin! Both are typically organic inbound traffic generation concepts which focus on building an identity and brand which can attract people naturally. But that's about where the similarities end! Social media marketing relies much more on a strong...

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